Data Science Seminar: COVID-19 in Estonia through the prism of data science

The COVID-19 outbreak took all countries by storm, information was scarce and contradictory. Estonian data-driven response emerged bottom-up by some of the best data scientists around.

At the seminar, you will hear about the efforts of modelling the growth rate of infections and predicting the threats for hospitalisation numbers, intensive care units and deaths, as well as the efforts to develop new data acquisition platforms, which included voluntary surveys and representative sampling strategies. For clinical health data, the Estonian data needs to be analysed, but would be small and limited without international context. However, the biggest obstacle in international clinical real-world data research is the difficulty to compare data from different countries, regions, EHR systems, and medical practices of data capture.

For overcoming such obstacles, international standardisation efforts for data and tools are necessary. You will hear about the OHDSI community, which builds OMOP common data model and associated tools. The ecosystem of such data is reaching hundreds of millions of patient records worldwide that can be included in studies.

Finally, the future management of the continuing crisis, targeting new infections and their connections early in the process, is still needed. For that, the numerous contact tracing apps have emerged, including the Estonian HOIA.me. You have a chance to hear about the principles of these apps, their timeline, and the current state.

We hope that the topics raise interest and questions. This is the first time such a group of experts is directly presenting to the public the scientific basis and overall effort by data scientists in Estonia.

• The seminar will be held in English. Limited number of participants can join. Attending the webinar is free of charge, but registration is needed here: https://bit.ly/33vEj1y

Agenda:

17:00 Jaak Vilo (University of Tartu): Welcome & introduction
17:05 Krista Fischer (University of Tartu, Estonian Genome Centre): “Nowcasting and forecasting of COVID-19 in Estonia: experiences from spring 2020”
17:30 Hedi Peterson (University of Tartu): “COVID-19 and us. Let the data speak.”
17:55 Raivo Kolde (University of Tartu): “Creating (inter)national COVID-19 evidence base through health data standardisation”
18:20 Dan Bogdanov (Cybernetica, HOIA.me): “COVID-19 contact tracing apps in Estonia and abroad”
18:45 Panel discussion

Information and recordings from previous seminars are available: https://www.cs.ut.ee/…/industry…/data-science-seminars